My path to minimalism
I still remember the first time I seriously thought about decluttering and minimizing. It was the year 2015, and I was reading my usual knitting blogs, which I pretty much checked every day. I was reading Rachael Herron’s blog (she started with a knitting blog that morphed into a writing blog and I love both topics, so I am here for it!). She talked about decluttering and getting rid of stuff, and she said some mind-boggling things about gifts. I had never heard anyone talk about stuff in this way, and I was intrigued. It was not long after that I picked up Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. And then I was off.
Well, sort of. I definitely went through the house. I definitely got rid of a lot of stuff. But I definitely did not become a minimalist. I still had a 2-year-old child at that point, and I didn’t turn off the flow of her items. We moved later that year, into a bigger house (can you tell I still hadn’t learned my lesson?), which necessitated buying more furniture to fill it. I had immense Mommy guilt about working full-time, and spent a lot of time researching and purchasing items for my daughter so that I wouldn’t feel so bad about leaving her for the majority of every day to justify why I needed to make more money. In fact, 2015 turned out to be one of my hardest years personally, while I struggled with undiagnosed depression and anxiety.
By 2018, I had quit my full-time job to stay home with my daughter for the last few months before she began Kindergarten. I used some of that time to clean out closets and reduce belongings. In 2019, I was in full swing and obsessively thinking about reducing the number of items in our home. I was still struggling with getting my daughter to let go of anything much, and I still had a number of things I was keeping “just in case” and out of guilt. That year, I lost count of the number of times I sold items on NextDoor, or took them to the charity shop or Half-Price Books. Often, these drop-offs caused full-on panic attacks. How could I have been so stupid? I had wasted so much money and time. And the worst part was, I could easily see how I could have better managed that time and money. There was another path, and I wanted to get on it. I just had to reframe my relationship with stuff.
That was a longer and more difficult journey, and one that I’ll be exploring in more detail in future blog posts. Even now, I’m still not where I’d like to be, but progress is better than perfection, and I know I’m now going in the right direction.